How was your January?

With one month already behind us in 2023, I thought it would be useful to stop and reflect. So here goes.

I’m super chuffed to get my focus for the year in order. I’ve made a solid start at revisiting and planning out backlogs for the twelve Ministry of Testing products I’m now officially leading. I’ve taken action immediately to sunset the MoT LinkedIn Group, have laid the foundation for rebooting Masterclasses and have made considerable updates to The Club (how meta, writing this here! :smile: ). All for the benefit of this wonderful testing community.

I’ve had all sorts of interesting conversations off the back of documenting what the community typically talks about. It’s been such a useful exercise in learning what matters to the community and it’s now a useful oracle for future decision-making.

How about you, how was your January? What successes and key learnings did you have? What pockets of joy can we celebrate with you? :trophy:

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Good job @simon_tomes !! I particularly enjoyed the MOT club being more active than usual :slight_smile: Thank you everyone for the great threads on recent topics.
January is the combination of many things that happened, vacation, fun, book (not 100% finished but proud with what I read and I even participated in a book review club with some old friends.
And I manage to keep my promise small iteration of year review, into month review with more details about my month. I hope I can make this commitment along the year.

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In January, I tried to monitor the performance of mobile devices. At present, the basic data of Android and iOS can be obtained normally, but I feel that the understanding of performance data is not deep enough

:laughing:

January was a great mixture of a vacation, which was to Belgium and Brugge was a great and lovely city, and hard-working. I was trying to automate manual cases of three different projects and decrease pipeline time. Also, new features, like converting rest-assured requests to cURL in logs. I learned about my performance evaluation for 2022 and my performance evaluation turned out better than my expectations.

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This January… I

  • Introduced my team to Example Mapping
  • Ran a Risk Storming session for a key feature for my team
  • Took a snapshot of my team around their confidence in testing, what they want to learn and what they think my focus should be in Q1 and used this to set expectations with the team

Those were the bigger things… some smaller things too I’m sure :slight_smile:

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What is Example Mapping?

It’s a method, discovered by Matt Wynne, that supports BDD and User Stories. A great place to start learning more is the introduction blog post:

After that, there are some great talks available on MoT Pro:

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Ooooh @eason Do share more on how you went about, just getting this data out. Nice work just starting this investigation. I’m curious to hear more


Work: January has been mixed. Got a major product release and it’s hairy integrations out of the door, so I feel super relieved and tired all at once. Nobody would listen when we warned that the deadline would slip and scope would suffer, but now I’m looking forward to a ship party. Work stress has been high, but it feels like we are moving into ‘Norming’ of the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing cycle that a doubling of company size brings since it started a year ago. So yes, tiring and I want a break, but I can also see so many cool tasks ahead of me to take on.

Personal: My campanology lessons continue and I’m now a member of a new still-forming band. Our first official band meeting is next week. So bizarre, since I’ve not yet learned to actually play/ring anything yet. Bring on the year I’m ready.

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First of all, I investigated the data that the industry paid more attention to, and then obtained the specific performance information through the adb protocol and the usbmuxd protocol. You can view

./sib mount
./sib perfmon
./sas perfmon

However, it is still in the basic stage. I hope my tool can help you

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My January:

  • I reached the “six months to go” point on my glide path towards retirement.
  • The company I work for got taken over by a much larger software house. So a fair part of January has been spent in going through the new group’s onboarding process, which included their talent management process, which turned (unsurprisingly) into a career retrospective for me. I actually found that quite uplifting - perhaps I’ve achieved more than I thought.
  • Said onboarding revealed that I am now officially a 100% remote worker, instead of my just assuming that. (Though being told about three months ago that “We’re re-organising your desk” was a pretty big clue.)
  • A family funeral put me back in touch with some relatives I’ve probably neglected for too long.
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Bless. Will really miss you Robert - hope you find a way to do the things you love, but not forget about us.

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What I can share:

  • I moved my blog tool (Publii - offline, for static sites) to another computer, which introduced a longer update cascade. I finished it so now I’m in better situation to write at all. Also I started writing two articles.
  • on 31th I started approaching thread-based test management (by James Bach) “bottom-up” in a diary-style. I’m still in the experiment, learn and change things. I want to share details about it in the future.
  • After over half a year exercising and experiment I feel now confident as a beginner barista, me having a certain consistency in my espresso making.:coffee:
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Beyond awful. A few of you will know why and I won’t elaborate.

However once I can pull myself back together, there’s a number of exciting things within testing, both at work and beyond, that I’m looking forward to. Whilst I’m on leave at the moment, when I return its with a new role where I might be able to influence testing and quality within a large company. I’ve also been intrigued by the improvements here and I can see myself spending plenty time here over the next year!

@oxygenaddict,

Thank you for being here and for sharing your bravery, Richard. You are an incredible human!

The community is here whenever and always. It’s lovely to see you on The Club. :hugs:

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